The Crux of the Cross

Dear old and new friends,

This time of the year a bare wooden cross perhaps draped with purple cloth is the central image in Protestant churches, while in Catholic ones it is a cross with the dead Jesus on it—a crucifix. Both of these crosses present us with a crux, a problem. Historically during Christianity’s first thousand years neither one of these crosses was seen! In place of the cross of death, a cross of the victory of life over death, a beautiful artwork in silver or gold, embedded with jewels and precious stones, was venerated.

The crux of the cross is that art images have enormous influencing power, or they once did. Today our eyes are numbed blind to images, their power diluted because we are daily saturated in a tsunami of images on television, in magazines and newspapers. It has been said that we now see in a day, or even in a few hours, more images than someone in the 12th century saw in their entire lifetime! To see an image of art then required being inside a church, whose walls offered fresco painted images that taught the viewer theology, scripture and the splendor of the resurrection.

The last decades of the first millennium a new religious image appeared. The earliest surviving crucifix is the Gero Cross of 970 which is a carved oak, full life-size image of the dead Jesus nailed to a cross. Rapidly, such life-size crucifixes spread across Europe becoming increasingly more and more grotesque and bloody. The Emperor Charlemagne then decreed these full-scale crucifixes be placed at the center of all worship places in an effort to unify his kingdom by convincingly converting his Saxon subjects baptized by the sword (Of note: Zealous Charlemagne also decreed that anyone who ate meat in Lent merited the death sentence!)

These new crucifixes proclaimed a new spirituality of suffering, death and a fear of hell, and asked the logical question, “Who was responsible for this horrendous crime?” Preachers provided the answer using fiery, agonizing images of hell. “You Saxons are guilty! You have murdered the Lord of Life by your sins!” That guilt-laden explanation lingers in today’s sermons and pious devotion, and it haunts with culpability those who looked upon crucifixes. Words from authority figures appear toothless, yet all words are living art images possessing incredible power, especially when repeated over and over and over, which is the secret of propaganda.

In 1095 Pope Urban II initiated the First Crusade, calling European warriors to take up the sword and wear the cross as their symbol to wage a holy war against Islamic forces holding Jerusalem, and against all unbelievers. The pope commissioned Peter the Hermit to preach the Crusade through France and Germany. His preaching on Good Friday in Cologne, Germany called upon the crusaders to force Jews to repent of murdering Christ and accept baptism at the point of the sword. Cologne’s subsequent slaughter of Jewish men, women and children was the first Christian pogrom against Jews. It is estimated that before turning east to the Holy Land the Crusaders killed approximately ten thousand Jews in Germany alone, where previously for centuries Jews and Christians had lived peacefully side by side. Peter’s diatribe of vicious hate speech against the Jewish people spread quickly across Europe, repeated by other preachers who created exaggerated bloody, gruesome accounts of Jesus’ death. The Jews had now replaced Christians and their sins as the new culprits guilty of Christ’s death.

Instead of the cross as a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, or of him as the scapegoat carrying humanity’s sins away to his death, recall that God is love. As the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert so the Spirit of Love drove him to Calvary’s cross. The cross isn’t about sin or guilt, but about God’s love. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says the first crucifixion took place in the heart of God as a total self-emptying in unconditional love to become one with all humanity and creation. That first crucifixion showed the helplessness and vulnerability of God’s love. The cross is an Icon-image of evolution where suffering and death are essential for the birth of new life. Theologian Ilia Delio says that the cross is about the wildness of Divine Love that’s stronger than death. Sadly, we eclipse its atomic energy by domesticating it when we use it as a decoration and by a lack of prayerful awareness when making the Sign of the Cross on ourselves. An old Russian saying is that you can tell the depth of faith of another by how she or he makes the sign of the cross.

In this reflection we have also considered the power of words like those used in hate speech towards the Jews. Words are more than just sounds. Words create vibrant living art images in the mind. Words like weapons can kill and injure, so our Teacher taught us derogatory remarks about others are equal to murder and merit the fires of Gehenna. The many centuries of insulting Jews by hate speech and derogatory jokes led ultimately to the deaths of millions in the Nazi Holocaust. Be vigilant of your words. Beware of echoing those whose vivid speech condemns abortion. Wash out your ears after hearing anti-Muslim, anti-police, anti-immigration and anti-racial black or white speech. When tempted to use any negative speech, pause and then obscurely make on your closed lips a small sign of the cross.

Eleanor Rigby and the Epidemic

And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said, “I’m lonely… I’ll make me a world.”-- God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson

Dear old and new friends,

Forty days is a long time to be all alone in the desert. Did Nazareth’s stone mason/carpenter after thirty some years of cramped close village life taste there the acidic bitterness of loneliness? Solitary confinement today is considered the harshest punishment, just a notch above capital punishment. So why did God’s Spirit drive him into the desert for forty days when today scientists equate the health effects of loneliness to that of smoking 22 cigarettes a day?

Modern loneliness doesn’t require retreating to a desert or being estranged from others. Paradoxically it is found in public gatherings, happy social events, Sunday church worship and hectic work sites. You can encounter it in loveless marriages, the staffs and residents of nursing homes and senior care facilities, in the homes of the elderly and infirm who live alone, and surprisingly by those with a microphone standing before large audiences. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang in the Beatles’ song Eleanor Rigby, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

Loneliness is the new black plague in spite of television’s endless display of us being always happy people, smiling with perfect white teeth, selling this or that—but that isn’t us! America psychologists tell us we are in the midst of widespread psychological depression. This “epidemic,” according to psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, has gone hand in hand with the loss of psychological and spiritual guidance. There is a nostalgic longing for the wise neighbor at whose kitchen table we once could confidently unload our inner feelings. People hunger for someone who will listen to them with no personal benefit except to wish them well. Ironically, flooded with an array of hi-tech message devices, people cannot find anyone willing to genuinely listen with only his or her welfare in mind.

Looking for a personal mission in life requiring no special education? Consider becoming a listener. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. It requires not giving advice (which we all love to do), not judging and simply the ironclad patience of listening. You can minister anywhere. When encountering anyone—stranger or friend— carefully look at her/his eyes for the dullness of loneness’s lack of joy. Then say a few words invested with sincere caring to them with the hope of rescuing them at least for a brief time of being frozen in isolation.

A Spirituality of Solitude

Seriously consider adding to your spiritual practices time in solitude. Turn off all your hi-tech gadgets and phone, and just be alone in silence. Self-imposed isolation is frightening. So let the Spirit “drive” you into it confident that it is a holy place. The Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for 40 days, and the same Spirit drove Buddha to a Bo Tree, there to sit alone for an extended period of intense contemplation. For both of them their solitary times ended with enlightenment, and each began to teach and minister to others. What gift is hidden in our dread of silent solitude that we try to fill up with music or worthless entertainment. Is it the same gift that Buddha and Jesus discovered? Neither spoke of what it was, but their lives loudly proclaimed it.

Perhaps Mark Twain may have given us a hint in his observation, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone….” (And I will add…or to themselves.) Could it be if truly sufficient time spent, not counted in minutes per day but in a true solitude, one is liberated from life’ s distracting three-ring circus of frivolous triviality so that very slowly one’s moon turns its dark side towards us? Once that happens its darkness and all that is secreted in it could be lovingly embraced and converted.

Or in their long solitude did Buddha and Jesus slowly descended down into their underworld of the Unconscious, symbolized by the dark side of the moon? We each have such a subterranean consciousness which is not some reservoir of animal drives; rather it is the unexamined reside of our earliest training and feelings about ourselves and the world. It is unexamined since as small children we weren’t old enough to make judgments of the behaviors of our parents or the influences of our home environment that were influencing us. Yet in each of us that unconscious contains the deep motives of our adult behavior and the drives that determine our conduct. So we are blessed when we attempt to confront that hidden inner consciousness that can lead to conversion, real growth and the self-assurance to become whom we were destined to be.

​Doctor Santorio’s Invention

Dear believing, doubting and non-believing friends,

Hearts, hearts and more hearts are everywhere you look these days, so if you got ashes today don’t let them float down and blind your eyes to Valentine’s Day, only days away. Valentine’s Feast of Lovers and Friends is an ideal companion to Ash Wednesday’s annual launching of Lent’s season of reform. But why do I need to be reformed? “I go to church every Sunday, leaving an offering of 10% of my income; I pray before meals and twice daily, read scripture every morning and am a volunteer at the soup kitchen—and I keep all the commandments!

Really, you keep “all” the commandments? For Jews and for Jesus, the Great Commandment isn’t one of the famous Ten, rather “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength.” (Deut: 6, 5; Matt. 22:37) To test if we keep that commandment you and I need the Italian Dr. Santorio’s 1602 invention of the thermoscope, what we call a thermometer. We each need a heart-thermometer to give us the degree of our love’s fervor for our Beloved Creator and to measure the degree of the heat of our love for those dearest to us. If your thermometer numbers feel off a degree or two, you’re fortunate that the annual season of reform that begins today provides you with 40 days to rekindle and stoke up the fires of your love.

After recovering from falling in love we all tend to love moderately within limits, not with great passion. We do so logically to insure our beloved’s death will not drive us mad. Marriage with its routine and sameness also lessens the once explosive fires of love and causes a lack of frequent gratitude and loving gestures and expressions. Marriage vows are necessary since we physically quickly change, and our once passionate love over time cools down until it is as lukewarm as today’s ashes. In the case of seniors, their once fascinating youthful love over the decades matures into an infallible ironclad companionship. Older lovers of God, after years of intimacy, experience that same confident calm love of companionship with their Beloved Lord.

Unfortunately, believers deceive themselves that fidelity to the laws of God and the church, along with Sunday worship, suffices for love. Non-believers and halfhearted ones don’t hate God but experience the opposite of love which isn’t hate, but apathy. When it comes to Divine matters they are indifferent, uninterested and, when forced to attend church, are bored. The temperature of their relationship with God is lukewarm. Also in failing marriages and love affairs any love left is likewise lukewarm.​ If fifty percent of American marriages end up dead in divorce, one wonders what percentage of God-human love relationships end up the same way? The Good News is if your heart thermometer measures your love of God as tepid, even if you are a doubter it can be re-enkindled. Surprisingly, enkindled love is conducive to enkindling belief, which is really Good News since it is healthy to deny the existence of some Gods we were taught existed.

One answer to how God looks upon the degree of your love is found in the book of Revelation 3: 15: “I know that you are neither cold nor hot…So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Those are the acidic hateful words of a god of whom you should be an atheist! It is healthy and holy to be a non-believer of that Revelation spokesperson, like several other false gods who are found in the “Good Book”…but who don’t really exist!

For half-hearted or devout believers, here are some suggestions. Begin to say aloud frequently throughout the day, “I love you, God.” When you experience a love gift from the Divine One like escaping some accident or finding some forgotten hidden money, say, “Thank you. I love you, God.” As you drift off to sleep as a final prayer of the day, “I love you, God…or Lord…or my Beloved.” Review your life and your talents, personal gifts you’ve been given, or a marriage partner or children, and see them all as individual love gifts to you from your Beloved God.

Regardless what you may hear from the pulpit or read in the Bible, God believes in you, even if you don’t believe in him/her. God’s love for you is always unconditional, more passionate than any human love; no matter if your love is nonexistent or only lukewarm.

Tomorrow's Marriage and Dates on Your Tombstone

Dear old and new friends,

Today’s marriage vows have remained unchanged for centuries except from the relatively recent historic deletion of the bride’s vow to “obey.” However, those vows need to evolve. Some readers may stop here saying, “I’m not married, so this reflection doesn’t apply to me.” But please read on because marriage is only the introduction to this reflection which is about your tomorrow. The conventional marriage vows today conclude with “…in sickness and health until death do us part” or “…all the days of my life.”

Love before marriage wasn’t even considered a reality until the 18th century. Today’s acceptance of marriage as a sexually exclusive, romantic union between one man and one woman is a rather recent historic development. Today half of all American marriages end not by death but by divorce…and there are those who fall in love and live as life partners without ever being married. Realistically that pledge of “until death do us part” is the desired ideal and could be compared to the rings on a tree that grow yearly. A happy loveship (more intimate than friendship) lived with loving fidelity, affection and care grows daily into much more than “until death do us part.”

That “much more” is expressed in a possible new four-word ending to our marriage vows promising love “…in sickness, health and death for all eternity.” The theologian Diarmuid O’ Murchu recalls author Michael Talbot’s words, “We are, as the aborigines say, just learning how to survive in infinity.” In addition, he says, “At this stage of our human evolution the human mind can scarcely grasp the notion of the infinite.” He then challenges us by saying the most controversial principle of quantum theology is, “The concepts of beginning and end, along with the theological notions of resurrection and reincarnation are invoked as dominate myths to help us humans make sense of our infinite destiny in an infinite universe.”

We have been taught God is eternal, without a beginning or end, and it seems heretical to conceive of ourselves in the same way, but the new quantum physics dares us to do so. We proclaim that the Christian God is love, and so that love surely shares in the Divine’s infinity. To daily attempt to live with the conviction that you will live forever radically transforms how you view today’s daily little hangnail irritations. Marvelously, you don’t have to create some great masterpiece to become immortal.

As we struggle with this new conception of personal infinity may we find support in Woody Allen, the American film actor, director and writer. He has been acclaimed a genius by the French and praised by Americans as one of the greatest film directors of modern times. Allen himself is more lighthearted: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying!”